Intel wants us dead, says AMD lawyer

After Intel accused it of breaching the cross-license agreement, AMD's top lawyer Harry Wolin repeated the company’s stance on Globalfoundries being a subsidiary, and thoroughly discussed Intel’s tactics the way he sees it.

Mr. Wolin argues that AMD wouldn’t exist in Intel’s notion of the perfect world, and although such a dream isn’t possible, it’s not going to stop Intel from “extracting monopoly profits from the industry”. Furthermore, he openly disagrees with the theory that Intel needs AMD to keep the game fair, and added how “they [Intel] would absolutely like us dead”. Intel on the other hand argues that it’s them who have been wronged, and refuse to discuss anything more than the current charges against AMD.

Intel doesn’t consider Globalfoundries to be a subsidiary since it is 34.2 percent owned by AMD and 65.8 percent by Advanced Technology Investment Co. AMD on the other hand, argues it’s not about ownership, and that AMD has met the conditions that qualify it as subsidiary. The company claims to have invested at least 50 percent of the assets, and since qualifying as a subsidiary apparently requires a 50 percent contribution and not ownership, this would make AMD in the clear.

So, if the alleged breach hasn’t been corrected in 60 days, Intel threatens to terminate AMD’s rights and licenses, which would result in lawsuits. Note that lawsuit of this extent would take a long time to come to court, and Mr. Wolin says it will happen well after Intel’s antitrust suit, scheduled for February 2010. Intel says that its next step is mediation, and if that doesn’t work the company will be off to court.

On another note, AMD recently claimed that the whole ruckus is Intel’s clever tactics of diverting attention towards their competitors, in an effort to cover-up the fact that it’s dubious market practices are under close scrutiny in EU as well as Asia.

You might know the case of Samsung and Samba Computers, the most important PC players in Korea, where Samsung’s punishment for using AMD’s chips in 2002 was withholding rebates. Afterwards Intel came out with an offer of a collection of incentives that was apparently too good to be turned down, and AAI’s documents suggest that the offered rebate plan weighed as much as $800 million. Similar thing happened to Sambo, but with the addition of convincing the company not to attend AMD’s launch event in 2003.